I’ve been thinking a lot about my children lately. It’s natural. It’s Christmastime. What I’m wondering, however, is what technological phenomena they are missing? As I posted the pic of my youngest Alex yesterday playing with my iPod, I caught myself thinking, he’ll never know the joy of popping a cassette tape into a Sony Walkman. My oldest, Lincoln, is already turning into quite the geek, and he’ll never know the fulfillment of typing Basic code into his computer for hours and hours just to get a little stickman to dance. Heck, he’ll never appreciate the subtle undertones of an 8-bit symphony such as the original theme to Super Mario 3. Holly, my daughter who’s 4, will never get to tie up the landline for hours and hours talking to her friends. She’ll just text them.
What’s fueling these remincings is mostly nostalgia, I’ll admit. My children and their children will have similar connections to technology as I did, even if their technology is so much more advanced. At least, I’m hoping they do because we are recycling my wife’s bookshelf stereo for Lincoln, which I’ve updated with a connection for his Zune and Bluetooth capability for his headphones (eBay is the greatest invention EVA!). I’m even planning to steal the trick my family used when my parents gave me a ghetto blaster for my 10th Christmas except I’m burning a CD that will say, “Lincoln, come find me?!?” instead of a cassette tape. But I guess the most important question for this post is whether my rush to integrate new technology into my children’s lives is depriving them of some of the sense of discovery I experienced. (I really should just buy him this!)
It’s a question I face in the classroom. Most educators assume our students know tech much better than we do when in reality, they don’t. In fact, I think technology has become so ubiquitous in young people’s lives today that they’ve learned only to pay attention to the stuff they think they need. For example, they can text faster than Mavis Beacon teaches typing, but they can’t access the calendar, to do list or e-mail application on their must-have smart phone. In my classes, students clamor to learn HTML because that’s what they’ve been told they need to know, but they are lost when I ask them to add a few simple tags to their WordPress blogs. They look at me with dead eyes when I tell them there’s a new code sheriff in town, and his name is PHP.
My guess is that the key to technology, whether old or new, is not whether it’s introduced but how. Instead of setting up the stereo for my son, I should let him run speaker wires and set-up passkeys with me. I should ask him to think about how he’ll use it and how he can make the technology fit. I hope to foster in him, and my other son and daughter, the curiousity that technolgy isn’t about what it can do now. It’s about what it can become. I love the stories of the early tech pioneers, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, and even Shawn Fanning and Niklas Zennstrom, didn’t accept that the technological parameters they were given. Instead, they said I can make technology work for me.
This is what the news media needs to do. More than any other technological application, news needs to be useful. To be useful, audience members need to know how to apply it to their lives. Instead of creating an online news site with all the bells and whistles, we need to focus on news applications that people can experiment with. Honestly, that’s one advantage a newspaper or a magazine still has over any of the fancy online gadgets available now. I can still throw it in my back pocket and take it anywhere I need to, be it a cramped airplane seat, a quiet coffee shop, the beach or the john. Why can’t we work on online news applications that integrates as seemlessly into our lives as a hand-tossed newspaper at the end of the driveway.
Maybe after I teach my son the wonders of Bluetooth, we’ll work on that next. If I did my job right, he won’t even need me. He’ll already have the curiosity and basic skills in place to do something even I couldn’t have imagined.
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One side note: If you don’t normally click on the pink links, I encourage you to with this post. I had as much fun compling them as I did writing this post. Who knew the Mario theme had lyrics?
I wonder if some of this is perception. I was so curious about computers and technology growing up because it was so rare to have access to one. I actually know a little BASIC programming because I was fascinated with it. Say it with me now:
10 ? “Jeremy”
20 goto 10
Run
And we get ….
Jeremy
Jeremy
Jeremy
Jeremy
Jeremy
Etc…….
Point was I could create with this wonderful machine that I could only access at school.
So your point about ubiquity is well taken. The reason I think it’s perception is because as technology evolves so does the thing that is scarce and interesting. What’s not as ubiquitous is the high quality tools to do really good stuff. Yeah, our phones and cheap cams do video, but we’re not quite at the point where things like HD and advanced video editing software are everywhere.
So there is some sense of wonder attached to those who can create with those tools. I programmed in basic; others do video mashup. It’s really the same stuff, just a different context.
Either that or I’m just getting old. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an Apple Logo drawing to produce.
Also, those links ARE cool.
You make a good point. It probably is perception. I’m sure there will always be people who are fascinated by technology and figure out amazing things to do with it. I guess I still feel, however, that as a whole, young people today are much harder to impress, and I think this stifles their creativity a bit. Maybe that’s just the grumpy old man in me who thinks that, but I still worry about my own children. Some days I look back at those early computer classes and think, man, I wish I would have stuck with that. Then again, I think that about piano and saxophone lessons too.
Very entertaining post!